Biz & IT —

Google Answers decides to close up shop

Google is closing its doors on Google Answers, but what's the real reason …

Google announced today that it is bidding farewell to one of its first side projects (and incidentally, one of the few Google projects to ever come out of beta), Google Answers. Google Answers will stop accepting new questions by the end of this week and will stop accepting answers to existing questions by the end of this year.

For those not in the know, Google Answers allows anyone on the web to submit any question, be it deep and intriguing or silly and curious, via Google's interface. The question would then be answered by one of over 500 "carefully screened" researchers within 24 hours. This was a good method for getting fairly definitive, expert answers on oddball topics that might not otherwise be easy to find via searching the internet with Google. For example, how many tyrannosaurs are in a gallon of gasoline? Non-researchers were allowed to comment on questions and answers as well, so that input from other web users was also included.

The interesting part about Google Answers was that there was a cost involved to the user, something that is relatively uncommon with Google services these days. Users with questions could post payment amounts of their choice, starting at $2.50 and up, depending on how difficult the question was and much they valued the answer from an expert. When the question was answered, the researcher (an independent contractor hired by Google) would receive 75 percent of the payment while Google would receive 25 percent—higher-paid questions were usually answered first for obvious reasons. Those whose questions got answered were also allowed to leave tips of up to $100 if they were particularly satisfied with the answer.

Why would such a seemingly useful service close up shop? There could be several reasons for Google to pull the plug on Google Answers, the simplest of which is that they want to move engineers to bigger and better projects. However, in the four years that Google Answers was open for business, it fell under some criticism that may have affected its popularity. Some said that Google was making money off of otherwise free services provided by librarians, and others were concerned about Google Answers enabling plagiarism by students. More controversially, however, some of the researchers involved were unsatisfied with the unruliness of Google's process.

One concern was that users were able to rate the answers they received on a scale of 1 to 5, and researchers with low ratings could possibly be up for "review." Additionally, if users were unsatisfied with the answers they received, they could ask for clarification (for no extra charge) or ask for a refund altogether. While this is all fine and good for the customer, the researchers saw it another way. Complex questions required time to research, and if a user did not fully understand the nature of the answer, they could request a refund and the researcher would not get paid for his or her time.

One ex-Google Answers researcher, Jessamyn West, feels as if the money aspect of Google Answers changed the dynamics of an otherwise useful service, she told Ars. Many of the researchers who participate in similar services, such as Ask MetaFilter, do the work for free because they enjoy being helpful. However, "once you start paying people, you need to treat them some certain ways from a legal and ethical perspective, and the Google Answers model wasn't ready for that," she said, adding that "you'd have people grabbing high-dollar questions who might not have been the best person to answer them." She also pointed out that that some Google "researchers" were not doing research at all, but simply searching—you guessed it—Google for the answers. "At the end of the day, saying you're doing research when you're searching Google (which was the way Google Answers skewed) is silly. I don't think the Google people may have thought much about how the money factor would change the dynamics," she told us.

West recounted an incident where she was put through hours of research and clarification for one unsatisfied customer, only to get dragged into a semantics battle between West and the customer along with the customer's mailing list buddies. This was all over $3 that she did finally receive, along with a one-star rating. "Is the customer always right when the customer misunderstands vocabulary words?" she wrote. (West ended up leaving Google, not because of her ratings but because she broke Google's terms of service by writing about her experience without prior approval.)

Policies such as this discouraged some Google Answers researchers from putting in work to answer tough questions, "since the questioner is the final arbiter of whether their question was sufficiently answered," said West. When the researchers are hesitant to answer questions, users are much less likely to submit questions in the first place, thus damaging Google Answers's popularity. And so, the days of Google's researchers answering oddball questions are coming to an end. Google Answers is soon to become one of the first Google services to disappear due to human—rather than technical—limitations.

Jacqui Cheng
Jacqui is an Editor at Large at Ars Technica, where she has spent the last eight years writing about Apple culture, gadgets, social networking, privacy, and more. Emailjacqui@arstechnica.com//Twitter@eJacqui